YOU CAN’T WIN You Can’t Win BY JACK BLACK With a foreword by ROBERT HERRICK New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1926 *All rights reserved* Copyright 1925, By Jack Black. Copyright 1926, By The Macmillan Company. --- Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1926. Reprinted October, 1926. Reprinted December, 1926. Printed in the United States of America By The Cornwall Press ACKNOWLEDGMENT This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks” Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo, Wisconsin. The Author. FOREWORD The revelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief. The honesty of the “confession” is self-evident. With a few lapses into the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing, either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities. Indeed it is that mental grip, enabling him to perceive and apply realities, that obviously brought him out in the end so that he could break the shackles of his criminal habits and reinstate himself completely in accord with society. It was almost purely a mental feat. At the end, to be sure, he dwells upon the helpfulness of kind friends, especially of Mr. Older, of the “square deal” he got from Judge Dunne, and recognizes fully the impulse of gratitude to a friend who helped him escape from prison by “cutting out the hop”—the hardest single bond he had to break. Those were emotional responses. But if it had not been for his own good mind which he had slowly disciplined by reason, that resolve “to go straight” would have been but another feeble human aspiration for amendment with which the human hell is paved. The chief interest I find in Black’s rapid survey of his life as a thief is this progress of mental awakening and a corresponding growth of character as a man, without which all the help of kind and enlightened friends would have availed naught. It is what Black did for himself, what he was, that counted most.